Account Organization
Good account organization helps you make changes quickly, target your ads effectively, and, ultimately, reach more of your advertising goals. By creating well-structured campaigns by theme or product, you’ll get more than just an account that’s easy to manage and keep organized: you’ll also have sets of ads and keywords that are directly related to each other, which helps improve your Quality Score. With a higher Quality Score, you can get more bang for your buck.
A well-structured account consists of separate campaigns for each of your product lines, general themes, or types of services you offer. Each of those campaigns, in turn, consists of tightly themed ad groups that focus on one specific product, service, or theme. And each ad group should contain specific keyword lists that relate directly to the associated ad text.
With a well-structured account, you can:
- Determine which ads are creating the optimal conversions (like sales or leads) and traffic.
- Monitor changes easily.
- Have better control over budgets and costs.
- Locate specific keywords quickly.
- Manage and edit your campaigns easily.
Top Three Tips For Structuring Your Account
1. Organize your campaign to mirror your website
A good rule of thumb for creating an effective campaign structure is to mirror your website’s structure. By creating campaigns and ad groups around a specific theme or product, you can create keyword lists that directly relate to the corresponding ad text, and ads that link directly to that product’s page in your website.
For example, a furniture store’s website is likely to have different sections for each type of product, like bedroom furniture and dining room furniture. The website might also have separate sections or pages for each specific product, like a certain bed or model of table.
Here’s an example of good account structure:
- The account contains everything relating to the furniture store.
- The campaigns are organized around broad product areas (the categories of furniture as a customer might group them).
- Each campaign contains several ad groups that focus on one specific product (like tables and beds).
This format can be changed to match your business and the scope of your advertising. For example, if you sell many types of beds, you can have a “Beds” campaign with ad group themes like “Bunk beds,” “Queen size beds,” and “Sofa beds.” Or, if you sell only one product or service, you can create a simple campaign structure around that product. For example, if you sell only lamps, you can create several ad groups based on descriptive themes like “beaded lamps” and “modern lamps.”
2. Create separate campaigns for multi-region advertising
If your business serves several areas, you might create a separate campaign for each location. For example, if you have a store in France and one in Italy, set up two separate campaigns, each targeting one of these locations. Each campaign should be translated to the local language and should emphasize that your services or products are available in that country.
Examples
- The campaigns mentioned above that target Italy and France should have ads in Italian and French, respectively.
- Local businesses such as furniture stores, real estate developers, or car dealerships may create a campaign for each region, and within each campaign, create a different ad group for each city or metropolitan area they cover. If you’re running a promotion in a specific city, you might create a campaign targeting that city only.
Tip
If you only plan to change bidding for a region, you can do so in the same campaign using enhanced campaigns. Learn more about enhanced campaigns.
3. Use AdWords Editor to manage your campaigns
Tool: AdWords Editor is a free Google application for managing your AdWords ad campaigns. You can use it to make changes to your account quickly and conveniently, whether you’re editing one keyword or adding hundreds of text ads.
Other benefits:
- Add, edit, and delete campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, and placements.
- Make large-scale changes quickly.
- Perform advanced searches and edits.
- Sort and view performance statistics.
- Copy or move items between campaigns, ad groups, and accounts.
- Export a snapshot of your account for archiving or sharing.
You can download the AdWords Editor here.